There is far more job security in, "So and so gets things done and makes us all look good" than there is in, "Who does that so and so think he is? He thinks he can't be replaced because nobody else will understand what he did!" And, truth be told, this is rightly so. If you place subtle and not so subtle traps for those who would follow you, you are being a liability to those around you.

I've worked for people who created job security by keeping essential information to themselves. This resulted in wonderful things like an important bit of scientific equipment where the data has a mysterious offset of somewhere around 8-12 seconds, only one person had the source and he refused to admit that there was a problem.

This was the same guy who wrote his own DOS-based multitasking system. The manual for it said 'commands are case-insignificant' but typing the same command with different capitalisation could give different results.

There are many more examples of similar behaviour from the same job.

Kevin O'Rourke

I went to university with a guy who claimed he would give himself job security by goingthrough his code at the end of a project and change all the variable names to single character names..... as he thought that this would make it harder to work on.

This was such a successful idea that, last I heard, he works reparing computers for the company he worked part time for when at college ;)

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